Viral Optical Illusion Will Disappear Before Your Eyes. Try It

Ready, set, stare!

New Delhi: It's no secret that the Internet loves optical illusions. So, it really came as no surprise that a seemingly innocuous optical illusion quickly went viral within hours of being posted on Reddit. The post has received 48,6000 upvotes within a week and has the Internet going nuts.

The post shows a bunch of blurry pastel hues blending together. At first glance, the picture does not seem particularly optical illusion-worthy. But Reddit user NightBreeze13 posted the picture with very clear instructions to offer: "This picture will fade away if you stare at it (may take a minute)."

Keep still and focus your gaze on one point of the picture below. Try not to strain your eyes but stare into it without blinking.

If you had trouble focusing on the image, a Redditor had this helpful suggestion: "Put your mouse pointer in the middle and focus on it. It makes everything fade extremely fast for me." (Umm, of course, you'll need to be on a desktop or laptop for this to work.)

According to the Illusions Index, an online database from the University of Glasgow's Center for the Study of Perceptual Experience, the freaky phenomenon is due to something called the Troxler effect.

The mind-bending phenomenon is named after Swiss physician and philosopher Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler who discovered that "rigidly fixating one's gaze on some element in the visual field can cause surrounding stationary images to seem to slowly disappear or fade."